Apple claims an 80% or 1.8X speedup compared to the iPad Air 2 A8X:
Apple's claims have historically been very accurate especially concerning multicore performance as compared in synthetic benchmarks such as Geekbench or browser benchmarks. Although we don't know how many cores the iPad Pro A9X has, it's likely quad-core since a tri-core design would require vastly higher clockspeeds or instructions per clock (80% higher). If the A9X is quad-core, then it only requires ~35% better performance per core compared to the tri-core A8X.
| Device | Geekbench 64-bit Singlecore Score | Geekbench 64-bit Multicore Score | Physical CPU Cores |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPad Air 2 A8X | 1807 | 4525 | 3 |
| iPad Pro A9X | ~2200? | 4525x1.8 = 8145 | 4? |
| MacBook Core M 1.1(2.4 turbo) GHz | 2295 | 4461 | 2 |
| MacBook Core M 1.3(2.9 turbo) GHz | 2629 | 5266 | 2 |
| MBP 2015 13" i5-5257U 2.7 GHz | 3206 | 6863 | 2 |
| MBP 2015 13" i7-5557U 3.1 GHz | 3431 | 7341 | 2 |
Sources: and
The smoking-gun quote on Apple's website:
iPad Pro is capable of playing three simultaneous 4K video streams in iMovie, without losing its agile responsiveness to your every command.
